Hero-U Holiday Update!

Lori and I, and the entire Hero-U development team, wish all our loyal backers and friends a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. (You can check out last year’s holiday card and poem at http://hero-u.com/happy-holidays-2015/.)

Have a Very Meepy Christmas

I recently shipped all of the “soft goods” – Hero-Unicorn baseball caps, All the Heroes t-shirts, and Blue Meeps – to backers who chose them as rewards in the 2015 Kickstarter campaign or BackerKit. Much thanks and appreciation to Eric Varnes, who designed the images on both the new hats and t-shirts.

While you’re at it, please make sure your email and mailing address are up to date on BackerKit. We’ll need them to hook you up with digital and physical game rewards, including the game itself.

I still need to print, package, and mail poster prints to backers who ordered them, and canvas prints to high-end backers from both campaigns. Lori and I decided to wait on shipping prints until we release the game, as it makes much more sense to have a Hero-U poster or painting once you also have the game.

Oh, That Door Looks Perfectly Safe

The Year in Review

2016 has been a roller-coaster ride for us. There have been some great and exciting moments, and some sad and terrifying ones. If I needed to describe it all in one word, it would be “unpredictable”. Sadly, I could use the same word to describe most of the development of Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption.

The hardest part of running a small indie business has been turnover. To date, we’ve had about 30 people work on Hero-U, but currently we’re down to four regular developers, three occasional contributors, and Lori and me. Health, family, and computer issues have cost almost every team member at least a month during the year, and much more for some. I’m not going to go into details, but many events unrelated to the project have created huge stress for us and the team this year. These challenges have continually impacted the schedule, but we’ll keep pushing until the game is done.

On the positive side, we’ve made tremendous progress with the game. I’m personally funding it at this point, and that’s appropriate. “With great risk comes great reward.” – Dungeonmaster or maybe the D&D Player Handbook. Fortunately, Lori and I turned 60 while working on Hero-U, which opens access to our retirement accounts. We’ll try not to exhaust them, but the game comes first! We’re much too young to actually retire.

I hope that sword is just for scaling the marlin

A lot of that progress is filling out the fine details of the game text and dialogue. Lori is down to the last few conversations. Josh Mandel has done a wonderful job of filling out the characters and game world by making every object in the game interactable. Our “Explorer” players – and everyone has some Explorer in them – are going to love the fine detail and humor that Josh has infused throughout the game.

Joshua Smyth continues to fill out the game with improved rooms and regions, better lighting, and of course the role-playing game combat. Each monster type has its own “personality” and behavior, although most share the common trait of enjoying the taste of rogue (or any other careless student). We lost Joshua to a “day job” for several months this year, and I can’t emphasize how critical he has been to the project since returning.

Al Eufrasio has had a tremendous impact on the look of the project as our animator. Al wrote a great post about the decisions involved in animating characters that I will share in the next update.

Unity Programmer Help Needed

I’ve had a balancing act throughout the Hero-U project. We need the right developers to complete and polish the game. But we also had to reach “critical mass” on the design, writing, and asset creation so they could get their work done. We also have a limited budget by game development standards, so we’ve had to run with a very lean team. That’s fine except when there’s turnover. In 2016, we lost most of Cidney’s time to recovery from an auto accident, Carolyn left for a full-time job, and most of Adam’s time to a triple-whammy of a dead computer and illness in the family. And now he’s moving on to a full-time day job, which will limit his time in 2017.

Lost in the Sea Caves

To finish Hero-U, we need one or two programmers to work with me on polishing individual scenes. The work will be a three-month contract with possible extension. If you have the right qualifications and want to join our small team, please contact me at jobs (at) hero-u (dot) com. (Note that this is a .com address, not .net as in the support email.) You must meet all of these requirements:

Experience developing games with Unity and C# (at least six months).

Available to work at least 20 hours a week, up to 40.

Able to work independently with a minimum of supervision.

Ability to communicate well with other team members.

Since this is a short-term contract, we prefer that you have your own Unity Pro license valid for Unity 4 (this is included in Unity 5 licenses).

Artcraft is headed by Gordon Walton and J. Todd Coleman. Gordon was an executive in charge of Ultima Online, The Sims Online, Star Wars: Galaxies, and Star Wars: the Old Republic. Todd was creative director on Shadowbane, Wizard 101, and Pirate101. I know Gordon through conferences, and I rate him One of the Good Guys.

Crowfall RPG Concept Illo

Merry Christmas! We’ll see you all in 2017. We’re all wishing for a much better year and a Hero-U release that will bring joy to you and us. Have a happy New Year!